Category — Wedding

Like every other bride out there who faithfully, reads blogs, I come across contests all the time. And I enter them. After all, who doesn’t like to win things? Well, I finally over won a contest! I won a MissNowMrs.com giveaway on the budget savvy bride’s blog! What is this, you ask? Well, it’s a sweet little deal to make changing my name a piece of cake! Not, bad, huh?

Finally! We were able to print our labels, thanks to a great gal at Kinkos! I was inspired by The Budget Savvy Bride to make wine labels for our beer and wine bar at the wedding. In addition to the wine labels, I wanted water bottle labels too. The plan is to put water bottles in our super cute welcome bags (stay tuned for pictures!) and to have water available for the rehearsal and ceremony. It’s going to be blazing in South Carolina, so we to be sure to have plenty of water around. I think they’re so cute!

Yes, I’m yelling at the printer. Why? Because I can’t get it to print my pretty little pile of labels. Consequently, I have a DIY project gone wrong in a major way. As G put it, it looks amateur. I ordered waterproof laser labels from World Label. It was easy, they got here fast, no complaints. And then I went to print them. First, the printer jammed. Then, it kept sucking multiply sheets of paper at the same time. Then, it jammed again. And again. And when we finally got it to print on the label paper properly, it was pixilated. Mind you, it looked just fine on the computer screen. Grrrrr…

After wasting over an hour trying to print the labels, decided to go home and try to print them on my inkjet printer. I knew this was risky because laser paper doesn’t work really well in inkjets, but at this point, I didn’t see any other option if I wanted to print them myself. As expected, it flopped. The ink bled and it looked like a sloppy, blurry pink and black blob. Yuck.

For those of you that know me, you know that I can get a wee bit fixated on things. At 1:00 a.m., my fixation was on printing labels. So, I got on the phone with a 24 hour Kinkos to see if they could help me. I explained the situation. The woman said “Yes, we can print on your paper.” (This was good news.) Then I asked if I could bring in my font. Her response “Can’t you just save it as a PDF.” This led to a conversation about embedded fonts that couldn’t be saved in a PDF and blah blah blah. So where am I now? At the same place I was hours ago when I started this project. Label-less. Yuck!

This has been of of my many labors of love. We’re getting married outside in Charleston SC in the dead of summer, so it’s going to be hot. I wanted to give everyone fans and programs, but didn’t want to do the programs on a stick that served as a fan. So, like any good bride, I hit the internet. And this is what I found. I went to work and this is what I came up with. What do you think?

I love how they came out! I think they are pretty and practical. However, I must say, they were A LOT of work. Each fan blade had to be cut out individually. Yup, that is over 400 blades. Once they were cut, I used a crop-a-dile to punch the holes and set the eye-lets. It was definitely worth the investment. And then I cut hundreds and hundreds of strands of ribbon, threaded them through the holes, and knotted them. Truly a labor of love.

This was a simple project that looks so pretty! We’ve all been to the party where we were left pondering what we were going to eat. It’s not so much fun. So, keeping that in mind, G & I didn’t want to leave our guests wondering. However, we also didn’t want to waste time and money printing individual menu cards. (Not to mention that using all that paper isn’t too earth friendly.) So here is our solution. We made relatively large menu signs to post during cocktail hour and at the beginning of the buffet. Easy and pretty. Gotta love it.

After going back and forth for quite awhile, G & I decided to rent a sound system and hook up an ipod for our music. We (read me) are pretty excited about this for two reasons. One, it is saving us a bundle of money. Two, we have complete control over the music played AND how long the party will last.

So now it’s time for the fun part. Now it is time to make the play lists. What are some songs you MUST hear at any good party? What makes you want to get up and dance?  Suggest away, please!

After playing around with a few bunches of flowers this weekend, I highly recommend the DIY route to any bride looking to save a lot of money. And here are all the reasons why. 1. )Flowers are naturally beautiful, which means you have to work extra hard to make them look bad. 2.) Simple is timeless.  3.) It is way easier than everyone makes it out to be 4.) It wasn’t that time consuming.

Here’s the process and then my own list of tips to help make your experience a bit smoother.

Materials

•  flowers from the grocery store (baby’s breath. 2 packs = $8 + spray roses. 2 packs = $8)
• floral stem tape  (don’t remember the price but it was pretty inexpensive and can be purchased at any craft store)
• floral wire 
• floral pins
• satin ribbon (about a yard)

1. The Process
2.  Begin by stripping the flowers of all there leaves. You can do this by hand.
3. Then, gather the flowers a few branches at a time to get them in a round, half sphere shape. I found I had to break off some of the baby’s breath at this point to get a smoother shape.  As you gather the flowers, use the wire to hold the stems in place.
4. Once you have our bouquet at your desired thickness, secure everything with a bit of wire. Then, begin taping. I started wrapping the tape  from the top and worked my way around until I got about 6-7 inches down. I wrapped the stems a few times with the tape to help smooth the stems out. I found the trick with the tape was to pull it tighter than what I found to be natural.
5. After taping the flowers, I started wrapping the ribbon around the flowers. I used the ribbon I will use at the wedding for this part, so I could see how it would look. I began wrapping from the top (about an 1 inch  or so from the top of the flowers and made my way down. My ribbon was 1.5 inches wide and it took about a yard for me to wrap all the way down and then back up. I folded the edge of the ribbon under and then pinned it down to secure it. After I secured the ribbon, I cut the excess stems. And voila! I was done. Yes, it was just as easy as that. Here are some photos. Not bad for the first try, huh?

Tips

• Definitely practice if you decide to do your own flowers. It will ease your mind and build your confidence.
• Keep it simple! I didn’t mix a lot of flowers and I think that helped a lot. It was less intimidating.
• Don’t be stingy with the tape. I found that using more tape helped smooth out the stems. 

Last week I posted on a picture of the reserved seating signs. Here’s how I made them. 

Materials:

• black cardstock (80 lbs)
• ivory cardstock (110 lbs)
• Illustrator (or some other program to lay out your design)
• A corner punch
• A ruler
• A paper cutter
• adhesive
• 7/8 inch satin ribbon

I laid a fairly simple design out in illustrator. I got four signs on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. After printing the reserved seating signs, I cut them down to 3.5 inches by 4.5 inches. I used black square scrapbooking paper for the background paper. I cut that to 4.5 inches by 5.5 inches. 

Once all the paper was cut, I used a corner punch to round the corners of both the black and cream paper. Once all the corners were rounded, I laid the ribbon in the center of the black paper. Once centered, I glued it down. Then, I ran my fancy adhesive roller tool on the cream reserved sign, centered it, and glued it down. 

The results:

Flowers are expensive, especially wedding flowers, and I am working on a tight wedding budget. That means I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on flowers. In fact, I don’t even have hundreds and hundreds of dollars to spend. So, very early on in the wedding planning process I knew I was going to buy bulk flowers and put them together myself. Yesterday I decided to practice and make a few bouquets.

I was going back and forth between baby’s breath and spray roses. Both are perfect for an outdoor wedding. Since I couldn’t decide, I made a bouquet of each. They are both so pretty! Which one do you like?

More on the process soon!

At least I plan to be a dancing machine on Saturday July 11th! The big question was what would we be dancing on. In an effort to keep our budget in check and save some money, I though we could skip the dance floor rental and decorate my grandmother’s carport and dance there. But, with a bit more thought, it seemed like the car port was going to be a lot of work and possibly a lot of stress. And in the end, it would only save us about $50-$100. Is $100 worth my sanity? Or suffering in the sweltering heat while I try to hang yards of fabric? I don’t think so. 

So, I went online in search of some pretty ideas for an outdoor dance floor. And, as I was looking, I found myself getting more and more excited. After all, what’s more fabulous than dancing under the stars with the man you love and your nearest and dearest? Not much.  Check out my inspiration!